That means American Express could be a nice bargain stock at some point next year. It also means that Amex is still a really good long-term investment, even if it is no longer America’s favorite credit card.

Therefore Lending Club looks like a successful company but not a value investment. Its platform is achieving a lot of growth, but it is not making money the way PayPal is. This indicates that its business model could be flawed or at least seriously limited, so you should stay away from it for now

If you want to take a gamble on a tech company that could be the next Google, PayPal could be it. PayPal’s revenue was growing at a rate of 14% in the first quarter of 2015. PayPal’s international revenue grew at a rate of 52% in 2014, the volume of mobile payments it processed grew by 58% and its total payment volume grew by 26%.

As you can see, many of the biggest names in American retail are still missing from the list, including the nation’s largest supermarket operator, Kroger, which owns such chains as Ralphs, Fred Meyer, Smiths, Harris Teeter, and King Sooper’s. All of the dollar store operators; Walmart, the largest retailer in the universe; Amazon.com; most department stores; and all of the hardware and home improvement stores are also missing.

It looks as if there is no tech bubble; instead, there seems to be individual bubbles surrounding specific stocks. That situation does not look as dangerous as an across the board bubble, but it does indicate a far higher level of market volatility than is being reported.

A look at Apple Pay’s website indicates that most of the retail outlets taking the payment app are specialty stores and smaller regional chains. From the looks of it, Apple is still having a very hard time getting retailers to adopt its payment solution.

To be fair, there are some signs Lending Club is starting to make money. According to its financials, Lending Club had $64.6 million in cash and short-term investments when it went public. Yet on March 31, 2015, Lending Club had $874.13 million in cash and short-term investments. That shows us that it is capable of generating a lot of cash in a very short period of time, but can it keep that up?

It looks as if bitcoin could have a future in the real world, and that could be the most disruptive development yet. We may need to completely rethink our concept of money and our ideas of economics because of it.